SWALLOW
Written on May 3, 2023 (♉︎︎︎)
All the incidental creatures of nature looked wrong when out of motion. There was no such thing as a still squirrel or sparrow in the background of one's life, and Ovelia's nine years had long been lived in backgrounds altogether. She knew the different strains of birdsong in the spring. She knew when bright-beaked terns would fly inland. She knew all the things monks and cloistered maidens grew used to away in the world, and it was because of this that the arrival of the red-breasted bird seemed a great event. When she found it collapsed on the courtyard, it was as shocking as a bloodied soldier fresh from the Eastern front."
She had been told that Alma had seen such men once--that she had once been at Igros during the trickle of injured fighters come back from the Larner. Igros might as well have been Falgabard or Eureka though. The war was as real as fairy tales to her.
"A vagrant," Simon had said when she brought it to him, wrapped in the folds of her dress. "I think it is eastern."
She hadn't been brave enough then to ask if it could be saved as well as named. The healer's arts--meant for men and occasionally livestock--didn't take to well to small things. She'd watched the swell and fall of its body, painted over with red feathers, unmarked by blood. She prayed wordlessly he might tell her what should be done.
Simon smiled at her before he sighed. He was very gentle when he took it from her.
He set it in a linen dust cloth and ran a finger along a bookshelf, telling Ovelia she still had boneset to gather and that she'd already missed Nones prayers. He was not unkind or insistent. He did not need to be.
When she found Alma amongst the gardens, arms full with twice as much boneset as she usually picked, she told her about the bird very quickly and all at once.
"How far do you think the poor thing came?" she whispered in reply. "Do you think it flew over the Burgoss?"
"I don't know."
"Do you think it has the plague? Ramza wrote that Romanda had a plague." She knelt and started stripping the little white flowers from her harvest into a basket. "Animals get lost and addled when they're plaguey, right?"
"Do you think it will die, Alma?"
"Probably. Birds don't do well by the time they're lying down."
Ovelia bit the edge of her mouth a little and knelt down to pluck flowers. She tried not to think too much when she caught up with her praying at Vespers. She did not ask how the little vagrant had fared when Simon remarked that it had been an Ordallian swallow.
"We might send it to Lionel, you know. It was very beautiful. There's a apothecary's collection there where it would be preserved."
His face fell even before she started bawling, and he awkwardly pushed a bowl of strawberries towards her as Alma looked up from her soup. It was clear he had little head as to how to calm a little girl's grief for a fallen bird and something sweet was the best he could resort to. They didn't speak of it for the rest of the evening, and Simon never mentioned it to her again--not even when the next dawn was full of whispers among the novices that somebody had stolen a specimen from the library.
Ovelia herself said almost as little as Simon. When Alma took her hand and dragged her from the chapel to the vineyards, her protests were quiet, and when her companion began to kneel over a half-hidden little cairn strewn with stripped lilies, her own prayers were silent.
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